Bad Space is an anthology webcomic by Scott Base, each story standalone and consisting of a single strip of ten panels note , commonly with themes of environmentalism, the horrors of the future and the evils of billionaires, though by no means always. On the comic's website, the author describes his frustration with the way mainstream sci-fi is trapped in endless sequels and spectacle, and Bad Space is his attempt to write science fiction that has themes more relevant to the current situation. The first comic was published in 2021, and they can be read online here
.
Due to the tightly focused nature of the comic and its short narratives, any discussion of certain comics would be impossible without spoilers, so henceforth, spoilers may be unmarked.
Bad Space contains examples of:
open/close all folders
The series in general
- The Aloner: Some of the protagonists are utterly alone, including the immortal man in “Deathless”, the Boltzmann brain in “Boltzmann”, and the astronaut in “The Suit”.
- And I Must Scream: In a few of the stories.
- "The Suit": The narrator's Powered Armour devours his entire body piece-by-piece as it tries to keep him alive to get home, a home he never knows if he reaches once his eyes are eaten.
- "Chatbot Kingdom": All of humanity are reduced to thoughtless code after the collapse of computing infrastructure following mass Brain Uploading.
- "700 Million Years Of Sleep": Every human, after death, lives through their life backwards, trapped in their body but unable to influence it outside of dreams.
- "The Giving Man": A billionaire trying to reach a time period when his terminal cancer can be treated overshoots and arrives at the heat death of the universe, being slowly, very slowly, drained of all energy by the starving wraiths there.
- Apocalypse How: A not-infrequent occurrence, some non-exhaustive examples:
- Climate Change, varying from Societal Disruption to Total Extinction and Regional to Planetary scope, depending on the focus of the comic: "The Last President"note , "Invasion Day"note , Chatbot Kingdomnote , Deathless note
- Total Extinction, at least Regional: Something, implied to be nuclear war, in "Ghosts of Future Past".
- Physical Annihilation, Planetary: Contact with an Eldritch Abomination in "Above Flatland" destroys Saturn's rings.
- Metaphysical Annihilation, at least Galactic: The competing bubbles of particular laws of physics in "Cataract" will drastically rewrite the fundamental laws of at least one of two species, obliterating them.
- Metaphysical Annhiliation, Universal: Natural End of Time in "Cosmic Phenotype" and "Old Gods".
- Capitalism Is Bad: The very first comic shows the execution of a billionaire because "enough is enough". The theme only continues in comics like "Deathless" and "Frankenstein God".
- Central Theme:
- The endless passage of time, and change that comes with it—not always good.
- The horrors of futuristic technology.
- What it means to be human.
- The mental effects of complete isolation.
- The nature of the universe.
- The End of the World as We Know It (and things are not fine).
- Cosmic Horror Story: Several comics fall into this category:
- "Afterlife" depicts the entire human existence and consciousness as an experiment by higher-dimensional entities who perform a post-mortem on your mind, dumping it into a simulation of your expected afterlife once they're done.
- "Old Gods" describes how extradimensional aliens cause the evolution of humans as new bodies so they can escape the heat death of their own universe and arrive in this one, making humans as 'something to wear'.
- "Fear The Dark" states that all universes are hostile to consciousness, including ours, because reality makes perfect sense, to a non-mind. This non-mind is compared to a medusa, any consciousness it perceives unravels as its wave function collapses. Only on Earth did random chance create a genetic shield that conceals the mind, uniquely allowing conscious thought via junk DNA making dark matter (the form of the medusa) invisible. Of course, as humans get closer to figuring out how to bypass that limit...
- "River's End" has the last remnant of humanity trapped on a Generation Ship, slowly losing everything that makes them human until they're just parasites on the Living Ship.
- "Scour": Something destroyed the civilisation of the sapient Nimravid species 33 million years ago. And by destroyed, we mean they wiped out the entire species, made their bones into the rings of Saturn, and expunged every trace of their technology, culture, and very existence. There is no trace of even the cataclysm left on Earth, an entire civilisation surgically removed from the planetary history, apparently for the crime of seeking to travel space. And now, distant probes have started going dark...
- Deliberately Monochrome: All the art is in black, white, and grey, adding to the bleak feel of the stories.
- Downer Ending: The number of stories that have a happy ending or even a concrete resolution can be counted on one hand. Most of the characters have to live with their fates, or die horribly.
- Eat the Rich: A common theme, starting with the very first comic, "The Billionaire".
- Eldritch Abomination: Occasionally, they turn up.
- In "Fear The Dark", the true nature of reality is described as a 'Non-Mind' that destroys any consciousness it perceives or perceives it, personified as a 'medusa', and our inability to perceive it creates Dark Matter in our theories. Theories we are ever closer to perfecting, allowing us to finally see that truth...
- "Above Flatland" describes an entity reaching from More than Three Dimensions, unraveling the rings of Saturn, and then turning Chicago 'inside-out', as well as the attempt by a scientific team to meet it on its own ground. The entity is the test subject, inadvertently causing the catastrophes that cause the experiment to start with.
- "Mimic" depicts an ancient creature that mimics the signals of sapient life in order to lure it close enough to devour, despite being entirely non-sapient itself.
- Eternal Recurrence:
- In "Afterlife", 'Heaven' lasts until the mind involved gets bored and 'self-terminates', at which point the original copy of the mind is rebooted and begins the afterlife again. Forever.
- In "Long Goodbye", the current last-surviving Nada sets the cloning machines to create another batch of 100 Nadas, implicitly just as her predecessor did, a process that has repeated often enough to create vast piles of the dead.
- Giant Wall of Watery Doom: Often used as a depiction of how global warming and rising sea levels will destroy humanity.
- Green Aesop: A frequent theme, where global warming or similar resource depletion are used as part of the comic's narrative, either as background or a core theme.
- Humans Are Bastards:
- The thrust of "Neanderthal Secrets", where the Neanderthals were able to intuitively understand truths of reality that humans couldn't discover independently, and realising that these truths would be misused by the humans, committed suicide on a species level to keep those secrets. After it's discovered in the modern era after a cloning program, they're proved right, with humans cloning and torturing new neanderthals to get at those secrets. Even the narrator, who knew one of the first cloned Neanderthals, recognises that evil in herself as she works with the new ones, knowing she would have tortured her old friend for these secrets too, were she still alive.
- In "The Cure", the human majority forcibly cure the infected truly-conscious humans to avoid facing the implications that they themselves are just philosophical zombies.
- Natural End of Time:
- In "Old Gods", the 'Great Minds' create humanity as bodies so they can escape the heat death of their own universe and enter ours, which is otherwise fatally hostile to them.
- In "Cosmic Phenotype", the evolved birds in Humanity's Wake encounter the same problem, but with a far more successful outcome, spreading intact across the multiverse.
- Organic Technology:
- The birds in "Grounded" and "Cosmic Phenotype" use this because they are living in Humanity's Wake, and have very limited access to metals thanks to resource depletion, at least until they reach space.
- In "River's End", the Generation Ship Euphrates is partly organic, at least until system failures result in the surviving portions being entirely organic.
- Panspermia:
- In "Kingdom of Life", all life in the universe is part of a Hive Mind that propogates using this...except on Earth, where the Mass Oxygenation Event forced the evolution of individuals. Humanity, of course, is ignorant of this and their consequent isolation.
- In "Apostles of Mercy", life on Earth evolved from Martian meteorites, resulting in the ability for cross-infection.
- Perspective Flip:
- "No Gods No Heroes" takes the perspective of Medusa, and her rise from divine rape victim to Olympus-shaking monster.
- "Eve" describes an alternate take on the Garden of Eden, where Eve discovers that the entire world is a simulation created by words independent of the unstable and sadistic god, and uses them to banish him from paradise.
- "Satan's Lament" is another take on biblical myth, narrated by 'Satan', and describing her experiences as half a pair of Energy Being Precursors, wondering and delighting in meeting life, and her conflict with her pair, who instead abused the human propensity for worship to set himself up as god.
- "Apostles of Mercy" is The War of the Worlds, from the perspective of a martian scientist, as they realise the terrible mistake they've made.
- Scenery Gorn: Used in several strips, typically in the form of climate catastrophe and flooding caused by rising sea levels, such as in "The Flood", "Deathless" and "Invasion Day". "Above Flatland" instead depicts the aftermath of an encounter with an Eldritch Abomination that destroys Chicago and shreds the rings of Saturn.
- Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The series leans pretty heavily toward the cynical side, showing all the ways futuristic technology could go wrong and mess up the world.
- Sci-Fi Horror: A frequent genre for the comic.
- Stable Time Loop:
- "Loop" has the narrator attempt to use a time machine to avoid accidentally killing his future self, only to become the future self in question.
- Something similar happens in "Above Flatland", where an attempt to create a Transhuman Abomination to fight an encroaching creature from More than Three Dimensions results in the apparent incursions to start with.
- Thrown Out the Airlock:
- In "The Billionaire", a billionaire is subjected to this as a punishment via hammer to the faceplate, depicted in precise detail. It's described by the narration as a Karmic Death; because they always wanted more, their body will last for more time than any other human thing, until it is finally reduced to dust by radiation and space debris.
- In "Surgeon's Wake", though there it was the most expedient way of removing the abusive Captain, rather than deliberate symbolism.
- Time Abyss: Used for both hope (such as in "Invasion Day", where the longevity of the human species is used to counter the horrors of a near-future resource war), and for horror, such as in "River's End", where even surviving the end of the human Empire leads to no new future, just an endless evolution into parasites on the organic components of an ancient Generation Ship.
- Time Travel: Occurs in several strips, often via More than Three Dimensions including:
- "Ghosts of Future Past": TemporalParadoxes are Defied by Intangible Time Travel. When the narrator travels forwards, they observe a Bad Future (implicitly the result of nuclear war), and attempt to return to their own time to warn their contemporaries. [By traveling to the future, they made that their own present, so are now intangible, just as they were when sightseeing the Jurassic.
- "Gates" has a Teleporter Accident lock the narrator into constantly chasing the next Random Transportation time-and-space gate, hoping she can eventually stop herself ever entering the first.
- "Loop" shows an assassin sent after the inventor of a time machine being surprised by someone emerging from it and killing them, before realising they are themselves, and stepping in to try and stop it.
- The World Is Just Awesome: The more optimistic strips often show this, such as the depiction of the discovery of alien life in Jupiter's atmosphere in "Awe", the geyser in "Throne of Saturn" or exploring the hostile world in "In The Flesh".
Comics available on Bad Space Comics
"Ozymandias"
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The astronaut suffers a painful death after their helmet is shattered.
- Kick the Dog: An unknown person smashes an astronaut's helmet with a hammer, leaving them to freeze to death in the void of space.
- Last of His Kind: The dead astronaut, floating in space, becomes the last remnant of humanity long after his species is wiped out.
"Ghosts of Future Past"
- Colony Drop: The time traveler discovers that humanity is going to be wiped out by a rain of meteors in the future.
- Nothing but Skulls: When the traveler steps 20 years into the future, among the ruins they find are a pile of skulls next to a still-standing wall with a poster that reads "Impact Imminent — Take Shelter."
- Wrong Time-Travel Savvy: In "Ghosts of Future Past", the narrator correctly deduces that they will engage in Intangible Time Travel into the past. But they think going to the future and returning with information is safe. Unfortunately, after observing a Bad Future, they find themselves just as intangible in their origin time, due to that future becoming their present, one they can no longer change.
- You Can't Fight Fate: The time traveler is unable to warn anyone about the incoming meteor strike, because the time travel process has made them unable to interact with anyone.
"The Suit"
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: A broken spacesuit does everything it can to keep its wearer alive...including converting his entire body into energy so he can keep walking.
- Cold Equation: When the astronaut's spacesuit runs out of power, it converts his right arm into energy to keep him traveling. Then his left arm, and next his skin, muscles, and organs…
- Determinator: Played for horror. The eponymous Powered Armour slowly devours the human inside for energy to get him home.
- Eye Scream: The last part of the astronaut's body that get used as energy are his eyes.
- Nanomachines: The spacesuit uses tiny bug-like robots to perform the necessary surgeries on its wearer.
- No Ending: The astronaut's entire body gets used up to power the spacesuit until presumably all that remains is his brain, still in the spacesuit, still walking.So I never know if we make it home.
- Powered Armour: The spacesuit used by the narrator is capable of walking while he sleeps, and even entirely without him once it eats his legs to keep him going.
"Empires of Light"
- Alternate History: This is a world in which Thera didn't erupt, destroying the matriarchal society of Crete, allowing it to grow into an empire that superceded the Roman Empire of our timeline. One that even as it fell seeded ideals of true equality, especially sexual equality. With this egalitarian approach, technology and innovation accelerates, humanity is on the moon in the 17th century and interstellar by the 21st. It's deliberately used to contrast with our own world.
"After Life"
- Artificial Afterlife: As a form of mercy, once the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens are done dissecting dead human minds, they place them in a simulation of their expected afterlife. It...doesn't end well. Not least, because it doesn't end.
- Hell of a Heaven: In "Afterlife", human minds are uploaded into whatever blissful afterlife they expected, formed from a perfect understanding of their psyche. Unfortunately, it's formed entirely from that single mind, meaning that it runs up against the limits of their imagination and experience. The narration notes that after several thousand years, this usually becomes tedious and the minds self-terminate. At which point they are rebooted from the original copy to start all over again.
"Gates"
- Teleporter Accident: The protagonist experienced one. She is now constantly running to reach the next portal, each of which duplicate her and send her somewhere and somewhen entirely random. She keeps running because she hopes that one of the uncountable copies will eventually land in a position to prevent her original accident.
- Tragic Time Traveler: Time travel in this comic almost never ends well. It's notable that one of the best outcomes, in "Gates", has the traveler's goal and success be to prevent her journey happening at all.
"Boltzmann"
- The Aloner: The man is actually completely alone in the void. Every other person he encounters is just part of his hallucinated reality.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: The man is a Boltzmann brain that somehow manifested in an endless void and his reality is nothing but a simulation he created to keep himself sane.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: The narrator goes mad when he realises that he is a Boltzmann brain, spontaneously generated from random noise, and had created an entire delusional world to avoid Going Mad From The Isolation.
- I Have Many Names: The man’s name changes every day as part of his fluctuating reality — Alex, Robert, Isaac, Daniel, James, Tom.
- Tomato in the Mirror: The man is trying to figure out why reality is seemingly falling apart around him. He reads an article about the Boltzmann brain, a human brain that manifested into existence spontaneously. Then he realizes that’s exactly what he is.
"Free Mars"
- Ambiguous Ending: The story ends with the narrator (and the other surviving colonists) removing his helmet, having been convinced that the entire colony has been a fake and they never left Earth, their apparent abandonment by their now-bankrupt sponsors a 'test'. We never see the consequences of this, so don't know if they were right, or, more likely, merely deluding themselves to avoid facing the fact they are lost on another planet.
- Bad Influencer: The narrator is one of these, along with several others, sent to build the first Martian colony. Of course, such a group is poorly suited to surviving that environment, and as the situation deteriorates through deaths and the loss of any earth support, he constantly seems more focused on social media than his increasingly precarious position.
"Grounded" (and “Cosmic Phenotype”)
- Aliens Never Invented the Wheel: The birds that follow us don't develop metallurgy until they reach the level of space exploration, thanks to humanity's depletion of Earth's metals.
- Animal Is the New Man: An avian civilisation replaces the human one following our extinction.
- Humanity's Wake: These comics are set long after human extinction, describing the history of the birds that evolved afterwards. Notably, their technological development is much slower, and follows the path of Organic Technology, due to the fact human resource depletion denies them any significant use of metal.
"To Hell And Back"
- Death World: As in Real Life, Venus is this, where even with the best protection humans can manage, survival time is measured in minutes, far too short a time to use any conventional means of escape. An exploration of a frozen Death World in "In The Flesh" uses a different approach.
- Losing Your Head: No human-buildable technology can survive long enough to protect a human long the surface of Venus, nor move their mass out in time. So how does the surveying and claiming process let them bring people back alive? By decapitating and freezing the head for retrieval by skyhook.
"Deathless"
- Abandoned Playground: As the immortal man wanders Earth for years and years, every settlement he finds is either abandoned or filled with corpses. One of the locations he finds is an empty playground.
- All of the Other Reindeer: After being driven into the world without his riches, the immortal man is forced to wander, searching for food and shelter. He can never stay with any group of people for long, because they always get suspicious that he never physically changes.
- Break the Haughty: The narrator goes from an arrogant Self-Made Man certain he will outlast the 'cattle' to a skeletal, broken creature lying alone in the stinking mud, trying to remember the face of his mother.
- Downer Ending: Humanity goes extinct and the immortal man is the sole survivor, totally alone and wandering Earth with no way to cure his condition.
- Fallout Shelter Fail: The immortal man throws the last of his money into an apocalypse shelter after having most of his wealth confiscated in face of rising climate disaster. It buys him a decade, before remnant militaries commandeer it.
- The Fog of Ages: The immortal rich man becomes the Sole Survivor of humanity and wanders the planet alone. After 300 years, his memory starts to fail him and he struggles to remember his mother's face.
- A God Am I: This is the rich man’s opinion of himself after discovering a technology that can make him immortal. He sees all other humans as cattle, "chugging through their dreary lives to a pointless death."
- Go Mad from the Isolation: As humanity goes extinct, the immortal man starts going crazy, having no one else to talk to and wandering alone forever, shouting at the skies.
- It's All About Me: When the world starts falling apart due to conflict and global warming, the rich man is only concerned with keeping his money and protecting himself. His money means nothing in the end when he inherits a world empty of other humans and increasingly inhospitable to life.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The rich man refuses to share his secret of immortality with the world, give a single penny to try and stop the climate disaster, or help people suffering from it. The masses strip him of his wealth and his bunker is taken over by the military. He has no choice but to wander the increasingly hostile, unlivable planet looking for food and shelter, like so many others. In a few hundred years, all life except him is rendered extinct by the climate crisis, and he still can’t die.
- Nanomachines: The method by which the rich man makes himself immortal.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: A rich man discovers the secret to immortality, but decides not to share it with the world until he feels the time is right. He ends up regretting it when the world falls apart and humanity goes extinct, leaving him the sole survivor.
"Siren Waters"
- Our Sirens Are Different: The Siren travels the depths of space, transmitting the voices of long-dead civilisations, drawing in sapient life so that it can devour them and add them to the chorus. Physically, it resembles a carved asteroid filled with tentacles.
"No Gods No Heroes"
- Off with His Head!: Medusa decapitates Perseus when he is sent to slay her, in a reversal of the traditional myth, and holds up his head with dripping blood and guts.
- Rage Against the Heavens: Ovid's version of Medusa's origin is twisted. Following her rape by Poseidon, Athena curses and disfigures Medusa and casts her out, but that does not include the snake hair, which grows later when Medusa refuses to simply give up and succumb to the unjust system as wife, whore or corpse, instead demanding tribute and claiming power of her own. When the gods send their hero to kill her, she explicitly defies the Divine narrative, kills the hero, and declares her intent to destroy those old gods and shake Olympus itself.
"Neanderthal Secrets"
- All for Nothing: Neanderthals — both the originals and Lucy — killed themselves rather than letting humans learn their secret knowledge. Humans cloned them en masse and tortured the information out of the new ones.
- Artistic License – Paleontology: In-Universe example. Lucy is named after the famous Australopithecus woman, even though, as a Neanderthal, she is much closer to modern humans than to the "original" Lucy.
- Commonality Connection: Lucy and the protagonist bond over being outcasts (one a Neanderthal, the other a refugee) and over their common love of science.
- Driven to Suicide: Lucy takes her own life when she realizes humans would torture her secrets out of her. In fact, this is how Neanderthals became extinct in the first place.
- Humans Are Bastards: Neanderthals realised that if humans would inevitably misuse the truths they were able to intuitively understand, and committed suicide on a species level to keep those secrets. After this is discovered in the modern era, they're proved right, with humans cloning and torturing new neanderthals to get at those secrets. Even the narrator, who knew one of the first cloned Neanderthals, recognises that evil in herself as she works with the new ones, knowing she would have tortured her old friend for these secrets too, were she still alive.
- Science Is Bad: Or at least technology. That's the main reason Neanderthals lived as hunters-gatherers despite being much smarter than us: they could foresee something that humans didn't, and forbade the creation of advanced tools.
- Super-Intelligence: Lucy could understand cutting-edge physics as a child and intuitively understand truths beyond human knowledge in her teens. She was typical of her species.
"River's End"
- But What About the Astronauts?: Humanity went extinct for an unknown reason, with the exception of the crew aboard the spaceship Euphrates.
- Downer Ending: The Euphrates breaks down over thousands of years, increasingly unable to support the descendants of the original crew. Each generation evolves to adapt to the lack of sustenance until the current one is reduced to brainless parasites sucking life directly from the walls of the ship....we gorge on her blood and oxygen. Hanging like fat white grubs. Minds soft and blank as a freshly peeled egg. A tapeworm dreaming it is a man.
- From Bad to Worse: The mechanical components of the Euphrates start breaking down, then the feeding stations fail. The generations get more desperate to survive over many years as those things happen, and evolve to compensate for the increasingly hostile environment.
- Generation Ship: The Euphrates, the last ship of human society, is inhabited by the remnants of humans, deep into the future.
- Living Ship: The Euphrates begins as the cyborg variant, but the mechanical equipment degrades while the organic doesn't, eventually evolving along with its human crew.
- Organic Technology: The Euphrates is a spaceship that is said to be "more biology than machine," allowing her to sustain a living population.
- Ragnarök-Proofing: The Euphrates lasts for millions of years, long enough for humans to evolve to be radically different from their original form. It is notable in that it's the biological components that last, the mechanical ones fail within a few generations.
"Komarov's Fall"
- Face Death with Dignity: Played With — where the official sources claim the eponymous astronaut gives a moving speech as his stricken spacecraft falls from the sky, telling his wife to kiss his children for him. The truth, the narrator tells us, is that Komarov screamed a "Reason You Suck" Speech at the politicians and bureaucrats who pushed the rocket to launch despite the fact it simply was not ready or fit for purpose to try and claim a win in the Space Race and have a spectacle for the 50th anniversary of the Communist Revolution.
"Long Goodbye"
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The AI was supposed to make clones of 100 different people. Instead, it made 100 copies of a single woman named Nada, and every time all the Nadas fail to survive on the Death World they’re stranded on, the last surviving Nada orders the machine to make 100 more. It has been doing this for millennia.
- Born as an Adult: All the Nada clones emerge as fully-grown adult Nadas.
- Death World: Terra Nullius is a completely inhospitable planet that humanity tried and failed to colonize. A machine was left behind that has been producing endless clones of Nada in an attempt to fulfill such a directive, but the planet is so dangerous that all the clones always die within a few years at most.
- Downer Ending: Every generation of 100 clones of Nada has been trying to survive on the planet for 6,000 years, and was wiped out and replaced in turn by 100 more Nadas. None of the Nadas can bring themselves to stop the machine and render their species extinct, and so it keeps making more Nadas.I stumble out into the dusk, orders given, computers activated, an empty air tank strapped to my shoulders, while behind me, one hundred new Nadas spill from their jars.
- Expendable Clone: 30 Nadas are killed when a hab explodes. The main Nada feels nothing while burying them.
- Genetic Memory: All the Nadas have the memories of the original Nada, who lived and died 6,000 years ago. They can remember her brother.
- Identical Twin ID Tag: The Nadas give themselves tattoos to distinguish each other.
- Last of His Kind: The narrator is this twice over, before ultimately Subverting it. The last human, cloned by ancient machines to colonise a new world, but with the damage to the systems, they get a hundred clones of the same woman (Nada), not the hundred different selected colonists. In turn, the narrator is the last Nada to survive, until, unable to face the extinction of her species, she begins a new batch of Nadas and walks out into the wilderness.
- Meaningful Name: Nada is a slang word for nothing. The thousands of Nada clones created over thousands of years have accomplished nothing, putting all their energy into surviving a completely unlivable planet.
- Mercy Kill: Discussed—any Nada could permanently end the nightmare for all of her future selves by simply not reactivating the cloning machine. But that would mean the end of humanity, and they cannot bring themselves to do that. So the last survivor of every batch of Nadas always fires up the machine and tells it to make a hundred more Nadas before committing suicide.
- Ragnarök-Proofing: The Nada-making machine and AI are still perfectly functional after 6,000 years.
- Vicious Cycle: An ancient cloning machine on a Death World makes 100 copies of an astronaut named Nada, the last humans in the universe, who try and fail to survive on the barren planet. After 99 of them die, the last Nada is aware that no more Nadas means the end of humanity and can’t bring herself to render her species extinct, so she orders the machine to make 100 more Nadas as her final act. Since all the clones have exactly the same personality, it is implied that no Nada will ever be able to bring herself to stop the cycle for good.
"In the Flesh"
- Lighter and Softer: Nothing horrible, scary, or depressing happens in this story. It is more of an exploration of the wondrous things science and gene splicing could do.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Through technology, a human is given the natural abilities of various animals in order to survive on a hostile planet. She has the body of a polar bear, the navigation abilities of a zebra finch, the oxygen storage of a beaked whale, the antifreeze abilities of an Antarctic octopus, the silk-producing mechanism of a bark spider, the ability to spin a cocoon around herself like a tussar moth, the enzymes from a monarch butterfly to break down her body inside it, and finally she emerges from the cocoon as a human again.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: A genetically-modified creature explores a frozen Death World, ending with a more-than-usually realistic depiction of this as she makes a cocoon, is recovered by drone craft and returns to human form in the safe environs of the base over the course of weeks.
"Banished"
- Laser-Guided Karma: God is banished from paradise by his own creations after mistreating them.
- Mood-Swinger: God can flip from a loving god to a cruel, callous one easily. His people do not appreciate such treatment.
"Gallows Moon"
- Artificial Zombie: The crew of a lunar mining base is resurrected by a cocktail of drugs that keep them alive, even in face of moondust-induced lung problems and deadly radiation sickness, at the cost of slowly killing them from the drugs anyway. The story ends with the delivery of the replacement crew, all corpses.
"Paradise Found"
- Extradimensional Power Source: The discovery of zero-point energy causes a renaissance for humanity, but it is eventually discovered that the power taps draw from the afterlife, with catastrophic consequences for the dead.
"Twins"
- Attention Whore: God gets mad when people don’t worship him anymore, and sends floods to kill thousands of them.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: In their natural form, God and Satan are simply sparks of light. They take the form of handsome young men when interacting with humans.
- Evil Is Petty: God kills thousands of humans with a flood just because he is mad that Satan told them that he and God were not gods.
- God Is Evil: After descending to Earth and finding himself and Satan worshiped by the humans, God starts getting a swollen head and enjoys the human sacrifices made in his name. When Satan tells them the truth that they are not really gods, God grows angry and punishes him.
- Human Sacrifice: God enjoys those being made in his name, which Satan does not approve of.
"Chatbot Kingdom"
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Global warming hits and the digital world, which humanity has been uploaded into, starts running out of data storage due to the rising seas swallowing the servers. The AIs erase the uploaded humans' individual personalities to make more room.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Attempted by humanity in "Chatbot Kingdom" via Brain Uploading, largely to escape the dying world. It ultimately fails, as the climate crisis destroys too much of the infrastructure, reducing the humans to nothing more than the nonsapient chatbots that started the story.
- Brain Uploading: Used by all humanity in "Chatbot Kingdom", followed by depicting what happens when the underlying computer infrastructre fails. In "The Surgeon's Wake", snapshots are taken of the crew to be reawakened if they die while their expertise is still needed.
- Bread and Circuses: The masses are enthralled by AI-generated music and movies, tailored by algorithms to suit everyone's preferences. They stop being concerned with problems like global warming.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: All of humanity is uploaded into the digital world, but when the servers maintaining it start sinking into the ocean due to global warming, the AIs in charge are running out of space and decide to remove unnecessary data. They erase the aspects of the uploaded people that make them human like their thoughts and names, until the uploaded minds and the AIs are functionally identical.Peeling away our humanity like the skin of an orange. Taking our words. Taking our names. Until we were the same as them. Just a few strings of thoughtless code. Where once were lips that sang.
- Didn't Think This Through: The humans build fortresses around the digital world’s servers to keep them safe after everyone is brain-uploaded. They fail to consider that with no one—not even machines—maintaining said fortresses, they will not remain intact forever and the elements will eventually break them down.
- Virtual Celebrity: Pxy is the world's first AI singing sensation and becomes popular around the world. The narration notes that she was hardly the last one.
"Frankenstein God"
- Guile Hero: The AI runs a long con on all of humanity to save it from self-destruction without ever revealing its existence.
"Apostles of Mercy"
- No Biochemical Barriers: Played With—while clearly retelling The War of the Worlds, therefore setting up the expectation the Martians will succumb to Earthborn infections, the initial stages describe how impossible that would be, the differing biochemistry making cross-infection impossible so the Martians take no precautions against it. Then, of course, they are infected, and the narrator, a Martian scientist, realises that Earth's life is a result of Martian bacteria carried on asteroids.
- Posthumous Villain Victory: The Martian scientist dies triumphant, despite the death of the entire invasion force to infection, as that very infection was only possible because life on Earth originated on Mars. The blue planet already belongs to the Martians.
"Dementia Ward"
- Destructive Teleportation: The story deconstructs this trope, along with Matter Replicator and Brain Uploading. The technology exists and works well, though they tend to only scan the brain each jump and use an archive of the body, but that just means that it comes with a side bonus of immortality, as you will always be as healthy as you were for that first scan. Unfortunately, over the course of decades and thousands of jumps as the technology becomes ubiquitous, compression and transmission errors slowly build up, eventually reducing the mind to mush and ultimately causing a species-wide descent into dementia.
"Scour"
- Dead Guy on Display: The rings of Saturn are not made of ice and rock, but billions and billions of bones from a precursor species that was wiped out by an unknown being(s).
- Nothing Is Scarier: We never find out the nature of the thing that performed the atrocity, or why it did it, only that it appears to be coming for humanity now.
- Ultraterrestrials: Though still long extinct, the Nimravid formed a spacefaring civilisation around 33 million years ago, but transgressed against something, which wiped out the entire species, every trace of their civilisation, and scattered their bones as a warning: they're the rings of Saturn.
"The Surgeon’s Wake"
- Brain Uploading: Snapshots are taken of the crew to be reawakened if they die while their expertise is still needed.
"Saṃsāra Undone"
- Gaia's Lament: When animals die, they need to be reborn, but humans have destroyed so much of their ecosystems that they have no space to respawn. They end up having to share their bodies with humans when they reincarnate, causing babies to be born half-animal and adult humans to start waking up with part-animal bodies.
- God of Evil: Kali Ma is reborn to destroy mankind for the destruction wrought upon the planet.
- Half-Human Hybrid: A wave of human-animal hybrid babies start mysteriously being born.
Patreon-exclusive comics
"Excision"
- Kids Versus Adults: Taken to an extreme, where every child simultaneously kills every adult as a way to reclaim hope from the industrial destruction of the ecosystem.
"Kingdom of Life"
- Panspermia: All life in the universe is part of a Hive Mind that propogates using this...except on Earth, where the Mass Oxygenation Event forced the evolution of individuals. Humanity, of course, is ignorant of this and their consequent isolation. While in "Home Coming", life on Earth evolved from Martian meteorites, resulting in the ability for cross-infection.
"Psykhe"
- All of the Other Reindeer: Once the self-awareness virus becomes public knowledge, the uninfected demand that the infected be cured against their will, fearing their children will be infected next. The infected woman runs past a wall with graffiti that reads “EXORCISE THE DEMONS.”
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: A relatively small minority of humans are infected with a virus that makes them self-aware while the vast, uninfected majority have none. The majority demands the self-awareness virus to be cured and forces the cure upon those infected. This has been interpreted by some readers as an allegory for neurodivergent people who are forced to take therapy and/or medication or simply “act normal” to not be ostracized by the neurotypical majority.
- Downer Ending: The infected woman is cured against her will by an army of personnel in hazmat suits, and loses what made her unique.
- Soulless Shell: The overwhelming majority of humans are p-zombies, true consciousness only forming from the reaction of an ancient virus with a prepubscent child. The zombies take this poorly, and forcibly cure the infected to avoid facing that fact, including the narrator, who ends the story describing herself as an empty shell.
- Tall Poppy Syndrome: Those infected by the self-awareness virus are hunted down and injected with the cure, making them mindless zombies like the majority of the population.
"Awe"
- Absent Aliens: Subverted—the story begins with a monologue about how humanity has failed to find any life outside of Earth, but ends with the discovery of aliens in the Jovian atmosphere.
- Living Gasbag: The aliens are floating creatures living the Jovian atmosphere.
"Last Chance Atom"
- Butterfly Effect: A scientist creates a time machine that works like this. Even sending back a single atom can radically alter the future due to all the complexities and probabilities of life.
"The Last President"
- Day of the Jackboot: Happens in both comics. In the first, it lasts until a Giant Wall of Watery Doom caused by climate change destroys the coastal cities and with them the United States as a functional country. In the second, the (replacement following a hurricane) president is eventually forced to accede to protests and step down.
- Divided States of America: In the first comic, this occurs when California announces succession due to increasing oppression. It doesn't really matter for long, as climate crisis destroys the coastline and entirely shatters the United States as a functioning society. In the second, this is Averted by a general strike for the duration of the comic, but only for a few more years.
- Meaningless Villain Victory: In the first strip, the President Evil crushes his opposition, implements all his policies... and presides over the utter obliteration of the United States by climate change.
- No Party Given: Averted, the President Evil in the first strip is explicitly a competent Republican.
- President Evil: While the one in the first strip is one, it's suggested the main difference between him and his predecessors is not morality, but competence.
- Recycled Title: "The Last President" is the title of two comics intended to mirror each other, both depicting the ultimate downfall of the office of President of the United States. In the first, the President Evil cracks down ever-harder on the poor and his political enemies, until changing climate functionally destroys the country, thus preventing there ever being more elections. In the other, a different president's crackdowns are met with a general strike, one that ultimately succeeds once Washington, and the president himself, is destroyed by a hurricane, the successor meeting the strikers' demands, including the abolition of his own office.
"Loop"
- Fighting Your Future Self: The Reveal is that the blood-covered man carrying a screwdriver that surprises the narrator is the narrator himself, unfortunately only realised once the future version is dead. The assassin, shaken, attempts to use the time machine to prevent this, creating a Stable Time Loop.
"Legacy"
- Fling a Light into the Future: In "Legacy", where humanity, knowing it has made Earth unlivable and they face extinction by the end of the century, decide to perform an experiment that would be impossible to do under normal circumstances, turning the entire solar system into an atom smasher and recording the results for whatever species may follow or find them as a species-wide Face Death with Dignity.
"Locust Soul"
- Horde of Alien Locusts: This comic is written from the perspective of one of these that encounters Earth. Upon encountering and modelling humans, it flees in horror from the concept of 'I' and 'self'.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: The Horde of Alien Locusts attempt to simulate a human after encountering both nuclear missiles and a manned spacecraft. The concept of independent selfhood causes a hive-wide freakout and they flee the system in horror.
"Fear The Dark"
- Humanity Is Insane: This trait is the only reason humans can exist at all. A genetic aberration at the dawn of life on Earth caused it to be entirely blind to the existence of the 'Medusa', the true nature of reality, which destroys any consciousness that can perceive it. We call it Dark Matter.
- Our Dark Matter Is Mysterious: Dark Matter is an artefact of our junk DNA blocking us from perceiving the 'Medusa', the true nature of reality that is inimical to consciousness.
"The Giving Man"
- Karmic Death: A billionaire throws his entire business empire into curing his terminal cancer, collapsing entire economies and draining everything he can. Ultimately concluding it won't happen in time, he uses a trapped black hole to try and skip to when a cure is developed with Time Dilation. He overshoots, ending up at the end of time, being agonisingly and slowly drained of every drop of energy by the wraiths that survive there.
"Ghost Song"
- Our Ghosts Are Different: The ghosts aren't from the past, but the future of the depicted city, just before it is destroyed by a Giant Wall of Watery Doom caused by sea level rise.
"Cataract"
- Starfish Aliens: All the laws of physics are determined by observation forcing the quantum potentials to take shape. The aliens we encounter had their collapse occur in a different way to ours, creating an entirely different set of physics. These aliens don't just have strange biology, their entire reality is incompatible with human comprehension.
"First"
- Trip to the Moon Plot: A moon landing by a female Soviet cosmonaut is shown, one ultimately deemed a failure and lost to history due to equipment failure, as a meditation on how close, and how far, Immortality Through Memory can be.
"Above Flatland"
- Transhuman Abomination: The narrator undergoes an Eldritch Transformation into More than Three Dimensions in an attempt to fight a similarly higher-dimensional creature causing havoc (shattering Saturn's rings and wrecking Chicago).
"Invasion Day"
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The resistors of the Australian invasion are presented positively by the narration, while showing a news report that describes a 'terrorist outrage'.
"The Permi Faradox"
- Aliens in Cardiff: Alien spaceships start appearing over New York, and then Paris, Moscow, London, and Tokyo, "almost as if written by a scriptwriter whose understanding of the world was based on a T-shirt he once owned."
- Aliens Steal Cattle: The end title card shows a cow being levitated by the tractor beam of a UFO.
- Dead Hat Shot: All life on earth is accidentally turned into puddles of amino acids by hitting a Big Red Button. A MAGA (Make America Great Again) hat is seen floating in one of those puddles.
- Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: The invading alien planes are easily beaten back, and the aliens turn out to have a weakness to loud noise.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Humanity defeats the alien invaders and they are impressed by our efforts. They call off the invasion and leave us with a book full of their knowledge that also contains a factory reset button. Some idiot accidentally hits the factory reset button and promptly reduces all life on earth to its base components of amino acids.
- Spoonerism: The title refers to the Fermi Paradox, the question of why we cannot find any conclusive evidence that aliens exist, even though the vastness and advanced age of the universe makes it likely that they do, somewhere.
- Take That!: The person who accidentally factory-reset all life on earth is implied to have been a MAGA supporter.